Here’s a recent thread on philosophy of AI from Twitter/X, in which I address rather popular arguments made by Emily Bender and others to the effect that LLM outputs are strictly speaking meaningless. I think these argument are flawed, as I explain below. But I think it’s worth categorising these as post-Searlean critiques, following John Searle’s infamous arguments against the possibility of computational intentionality. I think post-Searlean and post-Dreyfusian critiques form the main strands of contemporary opposition to the possibility of AI technologies developing human-like capacities.
Continue reading TfE: On Post-Searlean Critiques of LLMsTag: Technology
OftA: So, Accelerationism, what’s all that about?
Now that I’m trying to rekindle the blog, I’ve realised that I should probably consolidate some bits of writing that I’ve done elsewhere. I started a tumblr several years ago for lighter writing about more general topics. That didn’t really work out, for various reasons, so I’m going to port the best bits back over here. Following previous convention, these posts are classified as ‘One from the Archives’ or OftA. I’m going to start with one of the most seemingly influential, and yet largely underground things I’ve ever written: ‘So, Accelerationism, what’s all that about?’
This was a piece written in response to Malcom Harris’ review of the #ACCELERATE reader in The New Inquiry. Since I’ve now written something about ‘neorationalism‘, I’ve been thinking about returning to ‘accelerationism’ and talking a little about the emergence of the term, my relation to it, and my thoughts about it. I’ll save the details for a later post, but now that there’s a renewed interest in the definition, genealogy and taxonomy of accelerationism, it seems like a good time to dredge this piece up. I wasn’t the first to name the difference between left and right strands (I heard it from Benedict Singleton in Berlin in 2014), but I think I might have been the first to write about it. I’m still the top reference on the wikipedia page, at least.
Continue reading OftA: So, Accelerationism, what’s all that about?
DEONTOLOGISTICS 